Microsoft showed its true colors again when it released its latest service pack for Office 2003 with a feature that blocked older and competing file formats in what it called a security measure.
Microsoft Office SP3, released in September, now blocks old versions of file formats from both competitors and Microsoft’s own software. Users were not advised of the change in Service Pack 3 and found out about the block only after it was installed.
Microsoft said the reason was for security. In Knowledge Base article 938810 posted well after the release of Service Pack 3 the company admitted the security problem was not the file formats themselves, but the way Office 2003 handles them. “By default, these file types are blocked because the parsing code that Office 2003 uses to open and save the file types is less secure.”, the article noted. “Therefore, opening and saving these file types may pose a risk to you.”
Corel was not happy with the news and argued that at least one of their blocked formats, .cdr for CorelDraw, was still currently in use and had no known security vulnerabilities. Initially Microsoft shrugged off complaints from Corel and users claiming criticizing the move was overblown, but later decided to offer users a registry hack to circumvent the block.
Microsoft appended the KB article January 4, offering the the hack and admitting the problem was with Office 2003 and not with the blocked file formats.
This is precisely why proprietary file formats are bad for users and why the ODF standard was adopted – to avoid this sort of thing.
What happens to your WordPerfect documents when Corel goes out of business? Sure, Microsoft is not planning to leave the marketplace anytime soon, but they could pull support for their proprietary document format from you anytime they want. In fact, they just did. Now all of a sudden that resume, book or tax spreadsheet you created a few years ago and suddenly need is not available to you anymore.
When one company wields so much power in the tech world that they can cut off access to the personal and professional data of millions of users – data that belongs to you and me, not Microsoft – at a moment’s notice, that is just way too much control.
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